Finding The Heart
by JDCorley
Summary: Magneto on TV means riots in Mutant Town. Part 5, The Surgeon is up. An XMan is actually in this.
1. Dr Ana Fidelio

"Fill this out." said the nurse from behind the stained, scratched plexiglass, shoving a clipboard through the tiny slot. The nurse looked old, broken, tired. Her uniform was shabby, made shabbier by the bad light. 

"No, I'm not a patient." Ana said. The guy in line behind her had blue skin, he shoved Ana lightly aside, screamed something at the nurse in Chinese.

The nurse spat back "Sit **down**, Mr. Chang." The man with blue skin and the Mets cap threw himself back down into the torn vinyl waiting room seat. "We're not allowed to give out any information about patients." the nurse said, returning her attention, but not her eyes, to Ana. "Just have a seat."

"I'm here to start work today. I'm the new resident." Ana said.

The nurse looked up for the first time. "You're Doctor Fidelio?"

Ana nodded. "That's right."

"God help you." the nurse said promptly. "Through to the left." The door buzzed.

**FINDING THE HEART  
**A Mutant Town Story

Ana found the lockers, found a white coat and a stethoscope, clipped her ID to her pocket and someone rushed into the room, "Doctor, there's a code 288 incoming and we can't find the heart."

Ana didn't know what a code 288 was. Actually, she hoped that 'we can't find the heart' was code for something too. She ran into the ugly hallway. A young man with gray tentacles growing out of his fingers spasmed on a gurney. He was strapped to a body board. The EMTs said, "His sister found him like this." The blood pressure monitor showed he was dead. He screamed at the top of his lungs. "What does he have for blood?" Ana asked a nurse, who looked at her like she was crazy. It wasn't a code. Ana couldn't find the heart either. Everywhere she touched him she felt only slightly warm flesh, her stethoscope only hearing a viscous gurgle as whatever was in his veins pulsed slowly along.

"Fine. All right. Give me oral intubation of fluids, four point restraints, get a history from his friend in the lobby and why is he in the hall?"

"ER's full." said the nurse.

"Turf him to general medicine." said a male voice behind her. She turned. It was some asshole in a ratty cardigan and a badly tied texture tie. He had a five o'clock shadow.

"You can't just shove him up there, he's not stable." Ana insisted.

"I've done it. It's done." said the man in the sweater. By the time she turned around, the gurney was disappearing into the elevator. She ran towards the elevator, calling out, "Run a saliva screen and sweat patch to find out what he's secreting and..." The doors closed. She turned to the man. "Where's the stairs?" she demanded. He looked up the hall. She went up the hall. She ran into the stairwell. Her feet felt heavy when they slammed on the stairs. She rushed out into the hallway as the elevator doors slid open and she yelled, "...and we'll need a genetic workup - get a serum transfusion drip with a large bore needle..." The nurse was so surprised she was nodding even as the door closed.

Ana leaned her head against a wall, gasping for breath. A technician with spines instead of hair was looking at her. "Dude." he said.

"Dude." she said to him.

She went back downstairs. The asshole in the cardigan was leaning on a wall in the ER hallway, talking to an old man in a wheelchair who was throwing up into a bucket. "So we could dry you out, stick you in a room until you dry out, then roll you back onto the street, but you'll just beg enough for another bottle of whiskey, drink it, and end up back here, because you don't grasp that your mutation keeps you from properly metabolizing alcohol."

"Ain't no mutie." growled the old man.

"Right, all twenty two year olds look like they're eighty, throw up raw, undigested alcohol, and can bend steel jail cell bars."

"I was on PCB."

"You mean PCP?"

"Uh, yeah." The old man looked shifty, then looked like he would throw up again.

"Fine, anyway, my point was that there really isn't any point in keeping you here since you're just going to go out and get yourself back into this condition anyway. So I'm just going to dump you back out on the sidewalk."

"I'm sick."

"And I'm prescribing you a bucket." the cardigan guy said. "You'll have to leave the wheelchair, though. It's my favorite one."

"But I'm sick."

"Are you going to stop drinking?"

There was no answer. The asshole shrugged, and told a nurse, "Dump him on the sidewalk." The nurse moved to obey. The man turned to Ana. "Doctor Fidelio," he snapped. "We had three new admits while you were taking your morning run in the stairwell."

Ana said, "But I just got here."

"Oh, do you need more of a warmup?" sneered the man. "Need a morning swim, or a bit of the stairmaster at the health club? Or maybe a couple more med school classes? Why don't you just go home and do some yoga until you're ready to be a doctor?"

Ana glared at him, shaking in humiliation and anger. The nurses and staff were looking away, embarassed for her.

"I'm Doctor Adderson." said the man. "I'm your ER attending. So get started or get lost."

Adderson ambled into his office. Ana trailed behind him - like a puppy dog, she thought bitterly. "Look," Adderson said. "I can tell you have a long, successful, happy career in front of you. Somewhere else. I don't want to get in the way of that. If you put in for a transfer of your residency, I'll sign it."

"Are you firing me?" Ana said.

"No, you're quitting. Aren't you?" Adderson said. "It was a terrible mistake for you to come here." He was pushing patient folders carelessly off his desk onto a pile of other folders. Outside a fire engine siren went screaming by. Ana suddenly became aware that her CV was sitting underneath the patient files. "It's clear to me that you're not just a pretty face. Yale Medical School for god's sake. From a state university, you weren't grandfathered in, you didn't get one of those scholarships by being a dunce and you didn't keep it by being beautiful. But you're at least a pretty face. You could have had any residency you wanted by saying 'Yale' and shaking your ass." He demonstrated, doing a hideous moue and squealing "Yale" in a breathy stripper voice, and shaking his torso in a spastic parody of a dancer.

"Doctor!" snapped Ana, offended. "I worked very hard to..."

"Yes, that's exactly it." Adderson interrupted. "I don't think either of us has any questions about your willingness to work. You demonstrated ably..." He yanked out the CV and tossed it down on the desk. "...that you're willing to do absolutely anything to succeed. This conversation is not about whether you'd be willing to play on your beauty to get what you want, it's that you couldn't possibly have had to in order to work here. Unless maybe you tried somewhere else and the HR guy at the hospital you _really _wanted to be at was gay?"

Ana was increasingly furious, her hands clutched in fists.

"So look, I don't care who you pissed off, I can call someone, I can get you to whatever city hospital residency you wanted, there's no need for you to waste your time down here with the genetic detritus of..."

"I requested this posting. Sir." she snarled.

Adderson turned to her, suddenly curious, his voice intense. "You don't look insane, and your resume proves you're not stupid, so either you're stalking the remarkably attractive emergent services department head, which is perfectly understandable, or you have another reason. A personal reason."

Ana said, her voice still quivering with anger, "My brother. My brother Carlos. When he was thirteen and I was eight, he started to make light. His body made light. It was like he was made of light sometimes. He could make it into shapes, then into images like television. He did puppet shows for me. I loved them. That's why I'm here."

"Oh, that's a remarkably sweet-smelling pile of shit." Adderson said. "A mutant in the family and so you decided to come help the District X losers? No no. There are thousands of sisters with mutant brothers who never do anything except try to brain them with a crowbar in order to save their soul. There's more."

"He died." Ana said bluntly.

"Of course he did." Adderson said. Then he blinked, and turned widely towards her, leaning across his desk with his blue eyes alight with interest for the first time., knuckles down on the unfinished paperwork that stacked an inch thick . "There was a doctor...The doctor _let _him die, didn't he? He might have put his stethoscope here or there, or put a thermometer in his mouth, but your brother died because a doctor thought that it was probably better for everyone if he died. He never said it and your parents never said it either, but they were relieved when he died, and you were the only one in the whole house who seemed to care. Maybe you're still the only person on earth who cares that Carlos died. And that's why you're here."

Ana's mouth fell open. "How did you know...?"

Adderson shrugged. "You hadn't walked out yet. I must remind you of someone you really loathe."

Ana set her shoulders. "I'm not here to argue with you and I'm not here to loathe you. I'm here to treat patients. Who..."

"You're here to treat injuries and diseases, doctor." Adderson said. "Not patients. The patients are going to hate you because you have a pretty face and because when the next wave of giant purple death robots hits, they'll stop laser beaming things to let you cross the street. Hey, by the way, the rest of the city is going to hate you too, because they don't think there's anyone in this hospital worth keeping alive. So don't come into here expecting you'll find some kind of emotional fulfillment."

"I don't." Ana said. "I'm getting awfully curious about why you don't want me here, though." She crossed her arms firmly.

"Just go pick up your pager and get into some scrubs. There's a dispenser outside the locker room. There's no way you can wear anything else in a public ER. Consulting, yes. Not in the ER. Go."

At the door she said, "How do you find the heart on someone with no circulatory system?"

"You already know." Adderson said. "Pull whatever they've got out of their body and put more of it in. You've read MacTaggart's text on mutant physiology?"

"Yes." she said. "Five times. Is there something else I should study?"

"There's nothing else. No studies. No data. No cases. Nothing." Adderson said. "After MacTaggart is you and me. Past us? Just God. Just God. Go."

She went.


	2. Cowboy

She had been on shift ten hours when a cowboy backed his ambulance right up to the ER doors instead of just cruising up to the unloading zone and pulling around into traffic afterwards. 

The cowboy was wearing an EMT's uniform, a windbreaker with EMT on the back, and a white cowboy hat with a brown band, curled up on both sides. He was black and had a mustache and was as handsome as any man Ana had ever seen. He vaulted over the dividing wall to help his thick-waisted partner unload the gurney. The ER doors slid open as he bustled in, calling out, "I love comin' to Mutant Town! District X, baby, it's the best! Kellytown nurses are the best lookin' nurses in the world!"

"I'm a doctor, actually." Ana said. "Just give me the bullet, cowboy."

"New, but she already knows to call me Cowboy." said the EMT, recovering smoothly. "Nine year old female mutant, fracture of left leg, five foot fall, playground equipment, spiral twist, unknown skin condition."

"You splint it? Yeah, I'm new." Ana said. The EMTs lifted the patient from the gurney to a hospital bed with a quick practiced life of the canvas.

"We just wrapped it and got out of Dodge." the cowboy said. "She hasn't lost much..."

"Blood?" Ana prompted.

"Fluid." the cowboy replied.

The girl's hair was leaves and flowers. Her skin was bark-soft and pale as ash at her face, brown and thick and rough at her legs, one of which was broken like a broomstick, splinters and spikes protruding, sap leaking into the makeshift dressing.

"Ten years ago she'd be with the Morlocks." Cowboy said tenderly.

"Ten years ago she wasn't born. Time keeps marching on." Ana said. She opened cabinets until she found an orthopedic surgery kit and started stealing rods and wires from it. Tears of pain streamed down the girl's face.

"Do you eat regular food?" Ana asked. The girl slowly, painfully nodded. "Regular amounts?" The girl shook her head. Her voice was a dry, crackling whisper. "Smaller."

A nurse had entered. Ana said, "Give her a one fourth dose of Soldrosol, increase to one half if it doesn't dull the pain. And water, keep her drinking." Ana leaned over the girl and touched her flower hair.

Cowboy leaned over too. "Now your old buddy Cowboy is going to mosey on out and help some other people. This doctor here..."

"Ana." she said.

"Doctor Ana, she going to take good care of you, get you all fixed up, okay?" Cowboy held the patient's hand, gave it a light squeeze, then stood up. Heading out through the ER waiting room, he called out, "Ladies and gentlemen...but mostly ladies...It's time for New York's Best to go save another one. So whatever your evolutionary status...the Cowboy wishes you the very best and..." Here he kissed his fingertips and raised them to the sky, "...Praise God in all his heavenly works, A-**men**!"

Ana shook her head as the doors closed. "He for real?" she asked the nurse.

"He is what you see." the nurse replied. "The patient's ready." Her voice had a strange urgency to it, a sort of excitement, almost agitated.

"Stay calm." Ana said. "We're going off the farm but I need you focused."

"Yes, doctor." said the nurse. It was the first time anyone under her supervision had called her doctor since she came here.

"We are going to set this leg on the outside. A regular splint just won't hold. But I'm thinking that her skin is tough for a reason. That's where the support of the leg is. So if we pull this off she will be in great shape. Otherwise..." She might lose the leg. Neither of them said it. Even sedated the child might hear some of it. "We're going to have to keep it dry and moist. I want purified water only, we can't take a chance that there's a bacteria that will infect her because the wound's staying open. Any word on the parents?"

"No answer at the house." the nurse said.

Ana and the nurse looked across at each other as if recognizing each other for the first time. Ana knew the nurse would stay at the girl's side even if the rest of the building was falling down. "Nurse Peaseley." Ana said. "Ready?"

"Ready, Doctor Fidelio." she replied.

They started in.


	3. The Insurance Woman

Ana was just finishing up the last of her paperwork. It had been twenty hours since she had come on shift. She put the charts back in the rack at the nurse's station and passed the prescription review forms over to the assistant at the computer. 

A woman with a pinched face and a black business suit walked up and for a moment Ana thought that she was a relative of someone, but then she saw the light streaming in through the high grimy windows and realized it was morning. This was a hospital administrator or some other official.

"Dr. Fidelio, could you come with me please?"

"I'm off shift and..."

"It won't take long." the woman said.

She led Ana through into a room where a committee was sitting. There was not much to distinguish them all. They all looked tired, like they hadn't had their morning coffee. Adderson was there, but not at the conference table. He was sitting in the back of the room reading a newspaper.

The woman took her seat at the head of the table. "Doctor Fidelio," she said. "I work for the hospital's insurance company. It's my understanding that at three fifteen this morning you performed an orthopedic procedure while on an ER rotation. Is that true?"

Ana looked blankly at them, then said, "I used an orthopedic kit, rod and pin insertion techniques on a patient, but it wasn't surgical. She had bark instead of skin."

"It wasn't surgical. It was elective, Doctor Fidelio, and the insurance company is not going to cover it."

"She's an unaccompanied minor, she's on state care." Ana said uncertainly. "And it wasn't elective. Her leg was shattered."

"Bones broken?" said the woman archly.

"She didn't have any bones." Dr. Adderson said without looking up from his newspaper. Ana turned and glared across at him but he didn't seem to notice.

"What Doctor Adderson means is that she had exposed intercellular structure. That's the definition of a wound." Ana said, turning back to the committee.

"You can't classify someone as wounded just because they have no skin." said the woman, nudging the doctor next to her, who started slightly and said, "Doctor Fidelio...I know it's your first day, but we have a certain way of handling things here at Sacred Mercy..."

"I quite agree." Ana said. "I saw the prospectus when I was applying. 'The highest quality of patient care - for every patient.' That is what you were going to say, right?" She cocked her hip to one side aggressively. The effect was somewhat ruined by her formless scrubs.

"Uh...yes..." said the doctor reluctantly.

"Well, you're right to rebuke me, then. I should have requested an immediate emergency consult with a plant pathologist from the University. It was irresponsible of me to assume that a plant-girl mutant with a broken leg could be kept from infection simply by keeping the broken bark clean until it could mend. It would cost the hospital a fortune, but if it can afford to have morbiditiy and mortality committees when a patient doesn't even die, it can certainly afford to call in a tree surgeon to give his best advice on mutants who have affinities for our cousins in the plant kingdom. Right?" She folded her arms. Adderson folded his newspaper, suddenly interested in what was happening.

"Er." said the doctor.

The woman was livid. "Doctor Fidelio, threats of this kind will not be tolerated. You cannot make that kind of decision on your own. I'm requiring you to have all in situ treatment decisions approved by a senior member of staff."

"Okay," Adderson said. "I approve them."

The air had already gotten cold but Adderson's remark seemed to suck it right out of the room. "At the time of the treatment, Doctor Adderson!" the insurance woman said. "She will have to get approval at the time of the treatment."

"Whatever." Adderson said, and opened his newspaper back up.

"This meeting is adjourned. For now." snapped the woman.

"Good, I need some sleep." Ana muttered.

Adderson ignored her as she went. Ana figured that meant he liked her more than before the meeting.

Ana lived in Hell's Kitchen, where the people were poor but they consoled themselves by reflecting that they weren't mutants and didn't have to live in the Kellytown ghetto. She had been asleep for five hours and the sun was just going down when her phone rang.

She instinctively said, "I'm not on until four." when she picked up the phone.

It was Adderson's voice. "Get down here." he said.

"No." she said groggily. "Four."

"No." Adderson said. "Now. Turn on your TV."

She did. Magneto was on every channel. He had a red helmet, the transmission was wreathed in eerie static, he was broadcasting right onto television frequencies, no station needed, no cameras, no lights. Yet he had shadows on his face, a curl of grey hair barely visible. She didn't even hear what he was saying and she wasn't awake enough to care. Adderson was talking into her ear: "Magneto on TV equals riots in Mutant Town. The place is getting crazy and it's only going to get worse. Get down here."

She was in the shower by the time he hung up the phone.

**Day 2**


	4. Police Officer

Magneto was on every channel. He had a red helmet, the transmission was wreathed in eerie static, he was broadcasting right onto television frequencies, no station needed, no cameras, no lights. Yet he had shadows on his face, a curl of grey hair barely visible. She didn't even hear what he was saying and she wasn't awake enough to care. Adderson was talking into her ear: "Magneto on TV equals riots in Mutant Town. The place is getting crazy and it's only going to get worse. Get down here." 

She was in the shower by the time he hung up the phone.

**Day 2**

At 34th Street the city suddenly went dark. Signs blinked off, streetlights winked out, only the strange glow of the traffic lights, red, green, yellow, red, then green, then yellow. The radio was a man saying to stay inside, that Magneto and the Brotherhood were again launching a terror attack on Manhattan, demanding the release of one of their members from custody. 

Four police officers lounged at a barricade under a massive mural that said in capital letters three stories high DIE MUTIE. One tapped on her window with a nightstick. "You can't go through here, miss." he said when she rolled her window down. He pointed back at the street she had driven down.

"I'm a doctor," she said. "I have to get to the hospital."

"Sacred Mutie?" smirked the officer. "They'll get along without you, doctor."

"Or not." scoffed another officer, the others laughed.

"I got called in." Ana said. "It's my second day. I'm going to be fired."

"We have our orders too." said the officer. "You can't come through here. Go around."

"There is no way around." she said. "It's in the middle of Mutant Town. Give me a break, I need this job."

"Yeah, you must need it if you got stuck in a garbage can like Sacred Mutie."

Ana bit back her response but the officer's face turned from mocking to stone-faced and expressionless. "You got something to say about that?"

"Just please let me through." she said.

The officer started to answer her, he drew breath, his lips parter, and a man with wings fell from the sky, skewered like a butterfly with a metal spear through his chest, stabbed through her windshield and slammed into her car with a jolting crash so loud it didn't seem to have any sound at all, splashing glass and splinters of metal and plastic out of her dashboard like a grenade going off.

"Shit!" yelled the policeman, leaping back, grabbing at his gun. Ana was only dimly aware of this. She felt woozy, dizzy, she saw blood on her hands, was it his or hers, did it even matter? There was blood on her scrubs, but she had changed scrubs, she put on her scrubs in the dim light streaming in from her bathroom in the dark but she would have remembered blood, whoever's blood it was, the police were yelling at her, she heard them say things:

"Is he dead?"

"Fuck, her car is totaled."

"He's still bleeding."

"He's not dead."

"Shit, it's Worthington."

"Lady, you okay?"

"She's breathing."

"I'm...I'm in shock." Ana heard herself say distantly. "Call an ambulance."

She saw the wing twitch, spasm, he was still alive. "Call an ambulance." she repeated, her lips numb.

The next thing she knew she was trying to sit up and a hand on her chest was holding her down.

"Damn, girl, if you wanted to ride with the Cowboy, you should have just asked for my digits." came a void, low beneath the screaming of the sirens. "Now lie still so I can finish stapling up the billionaire on the rack next to you."

Her vision cleared slightly. She hurt all over. "Acetomenaphin." she croaked. "And water."

"Damn." Cowboy said. "You don't seem to understand who is in charge in my box." He helped her sit up only a few inches and gave her a small sip from a bottle and a little green pill.

When she sat up she could see a massive compress on the winged man's chest and blood splattered across the inside of the ambulance.

"Warren Worthington?" she mumbled.

"Real live X-Man." Cowboy said, sardonically. "Real live hero." Cowboy's partner snorted with wry amusement from the front seat. Ana felt the ambulance slow, heard shouts, cries, people outside it. She tried to sit up again.

"Don't." Cowboy said. "Seriously now. Do not try to get up."

"I..."

"Don't." Cowboy said, his voice almost tender. Everything went grey.

Adderson leaned into the grey. He looked annoyed. "Doesn't the insurance at this hospital allow you to get treatment someplace else? Someplace good?"

"You said to come in." Ana groaned. The quip sounded weak.

"And you even brought down a new donor. A billionaire. You know, most people would have settled for a millionaire. You don't have to suck up to the oversight committee that much. It's embarassing."

"She's in..."

"Save the bullet, Cowboy." Adderson snapped. "I've seen internal blunt trauma and shock before."

"Whatever you say," said Cowboy good-naturedly.

"Get your box out of the driveway." Adderson ordered. "Nurse?"

"On it." someone said.

Ana woke with such a jolt that she didn't realize she didn't realize she had passed out. She saw the sun through the pebbled glass window, she must have been out for hours. She reached up, someone had put fresh scrubs on her. Her room was quiet, dingy, dim. The one thing the hospital had in abundance was space. She slowly sat up, gently removed the IV, sealed herself up.

She pushed the door open. Where were her shoes? The hallway was full of people, noisy, loud, urgent. "What the hell is going on?" she said.

Nobody answered.


	5. The Surgeon

She was the one pushing Dr. Adderson in a wheelchair even though she was the patient with four stitches and a recent concussion and there was nothing wrong with Adderson, physically, that anyone knew of. "You have to understand," Adderson said. "It really doesn't matter what Magneto's saying. Just the fact that he's saying it is enough to make Mutant Town riot." 

"That doesn't make any sense." Anna replied.

"Why would it?" Adderson said, looking up with a scowl.

She didn't answer, instead saying, "Where's Worthington?"

"Why, are you going to sue him?" Adderson said. "Wow, a doctor from Sacred Mutie suing someone else for their negligence, that'll be a switch."

"No, I'm not going to sue him."

"Why not, he smashed up your car," Adderson taunted.

"He fell on it." she said. "It wasn't his fault. Magneto put a pole through him."

"He should have left well enough alone." Adderson said. "The last thing the world needs is more dead mutants."

"The last thing?" Ana said.

"Second to last is more unstable molecule wearing mutant adventurers." Adderson said. "Aha, this is my stop. Stay out of the ER, Doctor Fidelio, I really don't want to know how much medicine that bang on your head caused you to forget. You knew little enough before."

"What do you have against the X-Men?" Ana said. "They saved the world..."

"Exactly my point." Adderson said, shaking out his white coat and smoothing out the wrinkles from riding in the wheelchair. "Any decent person would have let it die."

"What am I supposed to do?" Ana said.

"What all patients do in hospitals," Adderson said. "Be bored until we throw you out or you die."

The chaos she heard through the door of the ER as Adderson slouched into it was almost palpable, the noise and stale air forcing her back into the quieter, emptier hallway.

She found Worthington in a postoperative recovery room. His wings were hanging in makeshift slings from the ceiling. They only had the single monitor on him, which was a good sign. The surgeon was over by the window, which was open over the front of the hospital, which was ominously quiet, only the occasional speeding police cruiser or the thud of a NYPD helicopter circling the neighborhood, or crack of automatic weaponry heralding that the riots were continuing. The surgeon was smoking. He was about to put out his cigarette hurriedly, then he saw who Ana was and he just smirked at her. "You came into the hospital the wrong way today." he said. "Horizontal."

"I hear you do that all the time. Shouldn't have vodka for your breakfast." she smirked right back.

The surgeon decided he liked that, and put out his cigarette. Ana looked at Worthington's chart.

"If you can make sense out of his vitals you're either a better doctor than my whole department..."

"Nobody's that good." Ana said, shrugging.

"We had Moira MacTaggart down here one time." the surgeon said. "I think she took a wrong turn at one of those ritzy uptown hotels. She looked like she'd stepped in something."

They both looked at the Angel. "He has some kind of healing factor." the surgeon said meditatively. "The organs were rebooting as I looked at them. Dead and black to red and alive. It was wild, like I was watching him be built from the inside out."

Ana sat at Worthington's bedside and looked him over carefully. "What the hell was he doing up there?"

"What would you be doing?" the surgeon said.

"Flapping like crazy. I'm scared of heights." Ana said under her breath.

The surgeon laughed. "I'm getting out of here before he wakes up. I'll let you medical nerds do all the touchy feely stuff. Got to go cut someone open." he said, and breezed out.

"Scalpel jock." muttered Ana, but with some fondness. The surgeon wasn't as bad as some she'd met. She sat at Worthington's side. Soon, as Adderson said, boredom set in.

"What were you doing up there?" she asked him. The monitor beeped slowly but steadily. The Angel breathed. It was all he could do. Maybe, Ana thought, it was enough.


End file.
